Their advance has been slowed by the deadly web of IEDs and booby traps the retreating jihadis have left in their wake.

With roads and buildings rigged with hundreds of explosive devices, clearing the villages and towns on the road to Mosul is dangerous work.

Lt Gen Michael Shields – director of the Pentagon’s Joint Improvised Threat-Defeat Organization (Jido) – last week said: “ISIL does an incredible job of booby-trapping urban terrain as either they are still fighting in it or departing it, as has been proven in Fallujah and other places.”

But Jido has now developed a range of apps to help detect the danger and provide friendly forces with the latest intelligence about the areas they pass through, according to Defense One.

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One of these – Catapult – collects data on bombs from over 550 sources across the intelligence community, allowing for more effective sharing of information between the various factions fighting against ISIS.

And another – Horizon – enables troops to plot that info on an interactive map.

A third app can use the available data to calculate how large the blast from a given IED is likely to be.

The tool – called Boom (Blast Origin Overpressure Modeler) – then uses Google Maps to display the blast radius, enabling troops to stay out of its deadly reach.

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A brochure describing the app says: “BOOM is a web-enabled application that allows the user to define a blast model by four inputs-explosive, type weight, a [homemade explosive] mix (yield) and the centre point of the last being modeled.